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Topic: Minidisc Owners - quality of ATRAC? (Read 4813 times) previous topic - next topic
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Minidisc Owners - quality of ATRAC?

I have a minidisc player, and I was wondering if there have been any quality assessments of the more recent codecs used in MD players vs. other formats. I did see some comparisons a while back, but they were of older ATRAC versions vs. the Fraunhofer encoder. Just curious if anyone can point me to more recent comparisons, including the LP compression schemes if possible, or give their own experience.  TIA

Minidisc Owners - quality of ATRAC?

Reply #1 –
There have been some discussions about this on the boards here in the past.  ATRAC (as used in most minidisc players, since there are many different versions of ATRAC) does not compete with a well tuned MP3 implementation.  Since MP3 resultingly can be outperformed by all the other major formats discussed on this board, that puts minidisc below the rest as well.

Try doing some searches along the lines of 'ATRAC AND quality' or something similar with the board search function and you should find some more info.

Minidisc Owners - quality of ATRAC?

Reply #2 –
ATRAC(3) isn't particularly amazing, but tbh the quality is pretty listenable on most stuff even in LP2 (half-bit rate double time mode.) I only use mine for portable use really so ill be listening on a pair of cheap headphones (MX500's ) so sound quality isnt a big issue.

Minidisc Owners - quality of ATRAC?

Reply #3 –
I just got the MiniDisc about a month ago...after a big decision whether to go with solid state MP3 player or the MD.

If you want to "archive" music, then MD is the wrong way to go in every way, since MiniDiscs are relatively expensive (compared to a blank CD-R) and contain much less data...and as Dibrom mentioned, the ATRAC is not as good as a LAME MP3.

However, if you're buying the MD as a portable player, especially for gym/mobile use, etc...then it's perfect, simply perfect. This thing never skips, costs less than most solid state MP3 players and its easy to swap the
MDs in/out if you want to listen to different albums.

I've been very happy with it, the sound quality is good (good enough for mobile use...I don't really notice any artifacts, etc), but once again its main reason for existence is mobile/portable use (like a walkman, which of course can't compare to a high-end tape deck).

Minidisc Owners - quality of ATRAC?

Reply #4 –
I think it's funny that MPC at 160 kbps walks all over ATRAC at nearly 290 kbps. Sure ATRAC sounds nice, but at 290kbps, it should sound a lot more than nice.
 

Minidisc Owners - quality of ATRAC?

Reply #5 –
Well...  for sure I do not want any kind of flame war, but what ATRAC do we discuss and on what devices? Because there is a plenty of great sounding MiniDisc players, but they cost at least 500 Euro and more... 

Minidisc Owners - quality of ATRAC?

Reply #6 –
Well... ATRAC is ATRAC, no matter what hardware uses it. ATRAC 4.5, of which I've listened to several samples, is somewhat poor compared with today's standards in high quality lossy compression. I doubt that the minimal advantages that the last ATRAC-R may offer can change this much.

ATRAC performs poorly with 292 Kbps simply because it's an old technology around 10 years old now.

Minidisc Owners - quality of ATRAC?

Reply #7 –
Quote
ATRAC performs poorly with 292 Kbps simply because it's an old technology around 10 years old now.


Same as MP3

I've did some tests with professional ATRAC devices (recoders of size of a normal home stand-alone CD player) and on some clips they really failed miserably - considering the fact that the bit rate is 292 Kb/s  makes things even worse for ATRAC.

One thing I don't know whether is this specific to implementations of ATRAC or standard itself - but since it is not open, nobody could verify that

Minidisc Owners - quality of ATRAC?

Reply #8 –
Quote
Same as MP3

... and on some clips they really failed miserably - considering the fact that the bit rate is 292 Kb/s  makes things even worse for ATRAC.

This is what I'm talking about. A Lame or FhG 256 Kbps CBR MP3 is much better than ATRAC 4.5 with its 292 Kbps. If we put VBR in, comparison is even worse for ATRAC.

Minidisc Owners - quality of ATRAC?

Reply #9 –
Thanks everyone. I did some searching and read the replies here. Well like I thought, it is not as good. Although, I will say, that I record most things in LP2 which IIRC is about 132kbps. At this bitrate, things sound good enough *to me* for 'casual portable listening', ie. I don't hear obvious artifacts like I do with poorly encoded mp3s, and I'm not doing ABXing or anything like that. At that quality, I fit 2hrs 40 mins on a $2 minidisc, and I think thats a pretty good compromise. I don't think anyone would claim that ATRAC is an archival quality codec, and it seems that it is not as effecient as recent MP3 or MPC codecs.

Of course I would love it if I could put mpc files on the minidisc, or ogg, or mp3. But thats not going to happen, so let's be realistic, it does the job fairly well, its not like people are listening to 128kbps old Xing encoded stuff that rings like crazy and has 'squeaking' noises everywhere.

One thing about the minidisc player that I LOVE - is that thanks to the recording capabilities and the optical in, I can use it as a decent quality DAC/Headphone amp unit for my phones. I'm sure the DAC is not the best out there, but it's a lot better than what's in my soundcard. I have a USB-Optical 'audio device' adapter that plugs into the MD unit. Yeah it's a cheap setup, but I prefer to spend my money on my main stereo then my headphone rig.

Also, I have noticed that the headphone output has a much lower noise floor, and seems to have more dynamic range than many cheap MP3 players I've heard (NOT all of them, I've heard some nice ones too) -  it seems that the computer companies would sooner skimp on these areas than the MD makers. If only they could find a way to get some other codecs on there, it would be a great format IMO.